CBRE Group

CBRE Group, the world's largest commercial real estate services company, reported total revenue of approximately $27.5 billion in 2021 and approximately $30.8 billion in 2022, with approximately 115,000 employees (excluding Turner & Townsend). The Global Workplace Solutions (GWS) segment — encompassing facilities management, project management, and workplace advisory — generated approximately $22.5 billion in revenue by 2023, making it CBRE's largest business by far. GWS manages facilities for thousands of corporate clients globally, procuring maintenance, cleaning, security, landscaping, and engineering services from a vast network of subcontractors. The fundamental procurement challenge at this scale: facility services are typically sourced locally by individual facility managers, creating fragmented vendor relationships that prevent the company from leveraging its aggregate spend volume for better pricing.

CBRE's GWS division pursued procurement consolidation as a core element of its operating model, leveraging its position as the world's largest facilities manager:

• Volume aggregation across clients: CBRE aggregated facility services spend across its entire managed portfolio to negotiate pricing that individual clients could never achieve independently. A single client with 50 facilities might represent $5 million in annual janitorial spend; CBRE's aggregated spend across all clients represents orders of magnitude more, commanding fundamentally different pricing from national and regional vendors.
• Strategic supplier programs: Established preferred supplier agreements with curated panels of vendors across major spend categories, with volume-based pricing tiers in exchange for guaranteed minimum volumes and streamlined payment terms.
• Turner & Townsend acquisition: In November 2021, CBRE acquired a 60% interest in Turner & Townsend, a global program management and cost consultancy. This added project cost management capabilities that strengthened CBRE's ability to control costs on large capital projects within the GWS portfolio.
• Centralized procurement technology: Deployed procurement platforms providing facility managers with pre-negotiated pricing, real-time spend visibility, and automated purchase orders, reducing ad-hoc local sourcing.
• Self-perform expansion: For select high-volume services, CBRE expanded its own workforce capabilities rather than subcontracting, capturing the supplier margin and improving quality control.